Ross at Less Travelled blogged recently for the first time in a few months, and some of his comments about faith and blogging hit home:

And so, after six months or more of not having written anything, most of that time not really having thought of anything particularly to say, I’m back in bed with my laptop, blogging at bedtime. Something seems to have gone “click” inside me, and all of a sudden my brain is back in this groove where I need to start thrashing out my ideas and angsty quandaries about God. I guess I’m no longer content to be discontent. link

Right there with you, buddy. I think Hamo did as much blogging during his blog sabbatical as I did while claiming to be actively blogging here. I did post a lot about bottled water and such, but not much about faith and church.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about our church and how we are not a very typical church at all, nor do we desire to be. We are more of a tribe than a congregation, and I’m not sure whether that’s OK. But maybe it is.

I’m reading the last few chapters of NT Wright’s New Testament and the People of God right now, and the insight I’ve gained in to the early church is not comforting. The first Christians feel like strange people from a lost era in a faraway land.

Wait a minute - they were (rather) strange people, even by contemporary standards, in a faraway land a long time ago. They were not basically the same as us in belief and practice, with only minor differences in language and culture. They were enormously different from us, yet we can still learn from their faith. What can learn, though, is a more complex question than our attempts to replicate the “first-century church” would indicate.

Many emerging churches have radically different structures than their mainstream counterparts - yet not all do. I’ve been thinking for years about church structure, and how our church is going to be different. We’re five years into Seattle Metro Church now. Over the past two years or so, I’ve been wondering whether it’s OK for us to be different - for us to exist as a group of friends rather than an organization.

Part of what frees me to see this as OK is the knowledge that “the church in Seattle” is not just us - it’s lots of little groups and some big groups too. Each church is just a small part of the church as a whole. The balance and diversity that the church needs to have in an area does not have to be visible in each small community.

To be a part of our community means, among other things, friendship. That can be a barrier to new people, especially when the existing friendships are very strong, but I don’t know that our church could be what it is without that emphasis on friendship. Should your church be your friends, and should your friends be your church? I haven’t seen much discussion of this question, but I’d like to. I suppose it depends on how you define friendship and how you interact with your friends.

I don’t think we can “restore the New Testament church” as the Restoration Movement sought to do. We can certainly revive its best features, but not by imitating forms we know little about and which have little relevance in our culture, 1900 years later. But I do think we have a long way to go in bridging the gap between how we live our lives, individually and as a church, and how we should live as followers of Christ.

N.B. I recently received a review copy of a book called 97 Random Thoughts about Life, Love, & Relationships. I haven’t read it, but I thought it was a good analogy for this post - random. Hopefully I’ll get a little more organized in my thinking as I dive back into more regular theoblogging.